The professional therapist often encounters difficulty in helping the young and/or resistant child, whose tendency to be uncommunicative renders the child less susceptible of benefiting from the therapy process. This is particularly so wherein the child is encountering intrafamily problems, such as the divorce of his parents.
It was thus desired in the prior art to provide a means to bridge this communication gap between therapist and child, and to focus on the problems in a non-threatening manner.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,779,557, granted Dec. 18, 1973 to Kritzberg, et al., and in U.S. Pat. No. 4,216,594, granted Aug. 12, 1980 to Farley, et al., there are disclosed psychological testing games.
Now there is provided by the present invention a psychotherapeutic device wherein a storybook setting depicts a traumatic event in the child's life, and through the storybook model the child is encouraged to complete the storybook by selecting a puppet figure exhibiting an emotion which the child feels is apt for the particular event in the puppet's, ergo the child's life.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide a psychotherapeutic device for use by the therapist with a non-verbal and/or resistant child.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a psychotherapeutic device as aforesaid which is a diagnostic aid to the therapist.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a psychotherapeutic tool-book for the therapist, wherein through a story telling or character model the subject child is stimulated to communicate in areas wherein the child would otherwise be reluctant to discuss.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a psychotherapeutic tool-book, which is useful in a broad range of situations, and yet which is relatively inexpensive to manufacture.